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I love the thought that went into this proposal and think the feedback mechanism to incentivize legislators thinking more concretely about the future (or give them a means to vote their conscience) is very interesting. I think two concerns haven't been raised yet by other comments. First, this proposal still doesn't seem to resolve the central problem: popularity or perceived future popularity of a policy are not necessarily linked to them being 'good' for the nation. Two examples: 1) What prevents a firm from buying LFPs close to maturity and running massive public relations campaigns to boost their popularity at the time of the vote? Larger corporations/industries lobby now with significant effect on legislative popularity, so this seems likely. The less confidence a legislator has that the "true" popularity will be reflected at the time of settlement, the more it incentivizes maximizing short term industry rent seeking/regulatory capture/etc. 2) There are a host of issues where I think the electorate is durably trending in a particular direction and that direction is bad. In contrast to your meat example, I don't want to buy LFPs in these because it endorses those views. If I believe popularity beyond the time horizon (eg 60 years) will be very different than before the time horizon I'm stuck with an incentive to buy (and thus lend support) to something I think is bad.

The second concern is: why doesn't this incentivize large wealth transfer programs that benefit the generation at t+40? Rather than create sustainability, it seems like you'd get escalating wealth transfers that would disadvantage current citizens to pay future ones.

An excellent article full of good suggestions. I appreciated that it's less certain of the Best Practices TM than many comments on this subject. I am curious how the goals/techniques for reproducibility change with the percentage of software/computational work that a scientific project contains. It feels like as the percentage of a paper's ultimate conclusions that are computationally derived increases, the importance of strict "the tests pass and the numerical results are identical" reproducibility also increases. Most of my projects are mixed wet-lab/dry-lab - a fair amount of custom code is required, but it's usually less than 50% of the work. When I'm relying on other papers that have a similar mix of things, I'm often not interested if the continuous integration tests of their code pass. I am more interested in understanding well the specific steps they take computationally and in a sensitivity analysis of their computational portion (if you slightly alter your binning threshold do you still get that fantastic clustering?). I believe this is because in my field (microbiology), computational tools can guide, but physical reality and demonstrated biology are the only robust evidence of a phenomenon/mechanism/etc. For most research I do not demand tests of all the analytical pieces they are relying on (was their incubator actually set to 37C? was the pH of the media +- 0.2? etc) - I trust they've done good science. Why would I demand their code meet a higher standard?

The exciting thing about this research is that the authors substantially exceeded the normal bar for publishing a scientific article (even one in Nature). They demonstrated industrial feasibility of their proposed enzymatic process by depolymerizing waste PET then repolymerizing it into a useful item (water bottle) that met industry standards for strength/ductility and coloration. I work in microbiology, and seeing research that connects basic biochemistry to actual industrial implementation (at the lab scale) is really impressive. There are pieces of their process that would need to be refined (and the cost of oil would have to rise) for this to be cost competitive with just manufacturing from virgin PET units, but it's a strong foundation. It's much closer to realization than most "researchers discover enzyme that does X and will revolutionize industry Y".

They are kept in vinyl bubbles. The only things that enter the bubbles go through sterilization: a liquid sterilization for tubes/plasticware, etc., irradiation for food, autoclave sterilization for water and liquids. Germfree animals have been around for more than 70 years - they are actually not that hard to create in rats and mice because a fetus is sterile in utero.

> I can't help but think of a GI tract completely devoid of bacterial and fungal cells as being a massive power vacuum essentially

This is absolutely true for the right organisms. Surprisingly there are quite a few common human gut microbes that cannot colonize a germfree gut. Reasons are still not totally understood.

> I would love to see a study analyzing a germfree mouse, rat or pig that was kept germfree to full life as best as possible and then do an analysis on their microbiome to see if, in fact, they are germfree at the end of their life too. I'm not confident they would be.

This paper [0] from 1971 is a good review of the 40's and 50's work showing that germfree hosts are basically normal and can be easily maintained as sterile with proper procedure.

[0] Gordon and Pesti, The Gnotobiotic Animal as a Tool in the Study of Host Microbial Relationships, Bacteriological Reviews, 1971

Microbiome researcher here.

We routinely use germfree mice, rats, and pigs in our research. They are completely devoid of bacterial and fungal cells. Their immune systems develop abnormally and they have some behavioral oddities, but they have no reduction in lifespan or fecundity.

Nutrient capture is really not that large a part of the gut microbiomes role; most of the nutrient and caloric uptake occurs in the small intestine of humans. The small intestine has many bacteria, but maybe 1e-3 fraction of the large intestine. Interestingly, humans have a much larger small intestine:large intestine ratio than close primates. Likely we evolved on such a high quality diet (animal protein) that our need to extract nutrients from plants declined and allowed shortening of the large intestine. When you get high quality feed, you don't need a big bioreactor to ferment plants into calorically valuable products like short-chain fatty acids.

This is not to say that humans aren't better off eating a very plant rich diet. All the research suggests strongly that a diet very high in fiber feeds a healthy guy microbiome which helps resist pathogen invasion and helps create a balanced immune system.

In short: if you could rear germ free humans, I think they'd be just fine, if perhaps immunologically odd.